At Google, recent natural disasters in Australasia have shown the growing importance of the internet as more and more people turn online for critical information. The question now is: how can governments, authorities and private companies like Google, help meet this demand?Last week, we hosted our first Emergency Management Roundtable, which brought together more than 60 of Australia and New Zealand’s leading emergency management practitioners.The Roundtable was led by members of Google.org’s Crisis Response team and local engineers involved in crisis response work in our region and beyond. From our perspective, we’re keen to share what we’ve learnt on using technology for disaster preparedness from Google’s responses to recent disasters such as the Japanese and Christchurch earthquakes. But crucially, we also think there’s a need to foster better public/private collaboration between emergency services organisations, government agencies and Internet companies such as Google.In times of crisis, we see that people use the internet to look for warning alerts, recommended actions, evacuation routes, the state of essential utilities, social services, shelter and access to food. Currently, not all this demand for information online is being met. At the roundtable, we highlighted a few things emergency authorities can do to help share information that will empower citizens during challenging times:

Provide open and interoperable data formats (data should be usable and shareable by anyone)

Provide open licensing or permissions for data (we and others in this space need to be able to republish data)

Provide more data - in times of crisis, we should look at making as much information available as possible.

In Australia Google’s Crisis Response efforts date back to 2009 where our engineers helped map the location of the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires. We’re encouraged by the progress made towards making more information available, but we also know there’s a lot more to do. Posted by Alan Noble (Director of Engineering, Google Australia) & Nigel Snoad (Product Manager, Google.org Crisis Response)